Hi, my name is Alex and this is Climate to Action, a California State University San
Marcos student podcast.
We're here to amplify voices, empower solutions to climate change, and address climate injustice
for all living things.
We are committed to incorporating discussions on Indigenous knowledge, in addressing the
climate crisis, and in providing a call to action in every episode.
But first, we'd like to acknowledge that our recording studio is located on the traditional
territory of the Luisaño-Payum-Cuehicham people.
CSUSM and its surrounding areas are still home to the six federally recognized bands
of the La Jolla, Pala, Palma, Pichanga, Rincón, and Ceboba-Luisaño-Paya-Cuehicham people.
It's also important to acknowledge that this land remains the shared space among the Cupeno,
Cumay, and E-Pai peoples.
Now, today's episode is focused on the intersections of war, water, and climate refugees, with
a special focus on the Middle East.
We'd like to acknowledge that today's topic may be challenging for those who've been
affected by war, so we encourage our listeners to please take care.
We've invited Cal State San Marcos History Professor Ibrahim Almirashi to talk with us
about this challenging topic.
Professor Almirashi, thank you for being with us today.
My pleasure.
We're excited to have you.
Tell us about yourself, Professor Almirashi.
What has motivated your area of study to include climate change?
So the history I work on is related to where my family comes from.
So my father would have come from what is today Iran, but he was born and raised in
Zanzibar.
And Zanzibar, my grandfather, was a cleric, who when he came to Zanzibar, his appeal was
widespread because it was believed when he prayed it rained.
So already there I grew up with stories about how my grandfather was able to relieve droughts
on the island of Zanzibar.
And of course, Zanzibar is a product of the monsoon winds so that my father lived the
life of the Indian Ocean.
A lot of places that might disappear, what would encounter with a scholar named Joshua
Busby said state death, the Maldives, Seychelles, even Zanzibar itself were stops on the way
for my dad to visit India where he did his undergrad.
So the environment, humanity's relationship to the surroundings was a part of growing
up from the stories from my dad's side.
On my mom's side, she comes from Iraq.
And she would always tell me stories of the flooding of the two rivers.
And so if I went and got my PhD wanting to learn about where I came from at the end of
the day, I couldn't study the Indian Ocean in Zanzibar, nor could I study Iraq without
an appreciation of how the environment shapes both those settings.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Well, we're excited to dig into this.
Do you know the most famous Zanzibari?
I do not.
The most famous Zanzibari, his name is Farrokh Bulsara.
Like my father, they both ended up having to move to the United Kingdom to London because
the Zanzibar was part of the British Empire.
Farrokh Bulsara, when he was in London, changed his name to Freddie Mercury and established
the band Queen.
Now when he says, Bismillah and Bohemian Rhapsody, you might wonder why is he saying the
opening call to prayer in Arabic?
Most likely Freddie would have heard that call to prayer coming from my grandfather's
mouth.
My grandfather who would make the call to prayer five times a day would have said the
word Bismillah.
So I like to think it was from my grandfather's mouth to Freddie's ears to Bohemian Rhapsody.
That's my connection to the group Queen.
Wow.
That's so cool.
So we're excited to dig into this.
Conflict in the Middle East has lasted centuries and this has led to migrations, generations
living in warfare and the exodus of an entire nation.
Tell us a little bit about this.
Well, I mean, I like to think of the story of Abraham, who I'm named after.
Abraham is the Arabic for Abraham.
He came from what is today's Iraq, a town called Ur, and worked his way up the two rivers,
the Euphrates and Tigris and the land in between, and then reached the eastern, towards the
eastern Mediterranean.
I like to consider him the first climate refugee.
So in our conversation today, when I want to make the argument that we can affect climate
action, it's by the words we use and the way we reframe these issues.
So if you want to go back to millennia from Abraham as a climate refugee, and then you
have it in the Bible, people refer to as the sea peoples, were probably refugees in some
way or the other, escaping some kind of cloud, we don't know, volcanic eruption, crop collapse,
something happened with the environment.
So you have this kind of confederation of peoples on the seas just attacking the eastern
Mediterranean, going to the very conflict right now occurring on the eastern Mediterranean,
where what's hidden behind the story was that these were, there were desperate populations
approaching water bankruptcy, and what I would argue both Yemen and Gaza.
And it's not an accident that you have two non-state actors, Hamas and the Houthis, who
became violent non-state actors for a variety of political reasons, but we could also say
political ecological reasons.
Yemen was reaching water bankruptcy.
The aquifers underneath the Gaza Strip were becoming so heavily salinated that when a
population is thirsty, violence is one of the options that they turn to or displacement.
Whether it's the dust bowl during the Great Depression here to the crises in the Middle
East, this is the way the environment interacts with displacement and or violence.
Relative to that, you have mentioned what you refer to as hydroterrorism.
Please explain this to our listeners.
How has hydroterrorism and global warming caused severe water shortages in the Middle
East?
So one way of thinking of the 21st century and one of the most vicious terrorist groups
of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
I would argue we should call it the Islamic State of the Euphrates and Tigris.
It makes a lot more sense because where ISIS spread was very much contained by the flow
of the Euphrates and Tigris River.
The first capital, Raqqa, is in Syria and that was a place that had a lot of displaced
farmers who became displaced due to drought and then preceding the drought mismanaged
water to cultivate cotton in Syria.
Cotton is a very heavy water intensive crop.
Then on the other level, you had a good number of militias on the southern confluence of
the Euphrates and Tigris, mobilized to fight ISIS.
A good number of those militias were also displaced farmers, particularly of the Marcia
areas that were home to the biblical Garden of Eden.
So there's always a hidden story of the way the environment intersects with conflict and
cooperation.
Oh, that's interesting.
We'd like to hear from you about the region's environment.
Has ongoing conflict in the Middle East affected the region's agricultural productivity, things
like soil and water contamination, and the infrastructure, in particular the livelihoods of farming
communities?
It's a vicious circle.
It's that the environment, when it's stressed, leads to displacement.
And then those displaced people turn to violence.
And then those people who take up violence then put further stresses on the environment.
If we go back to the case of the Islamic State, of the Euphrates and Tigris, what I argue is
hydroterrorism is weaponizing water or kind of conducting an ecocide.
So I assist when it controlled the Mosul dam.
The big fear was they would destroy the dam.
And had they destroyed it, every city downstream, whether it's Mosul or Baghdad, would have been
flooded.
You would have talked about the death of millions of people.
And then the other way you conduct hydroterrorism is when you control the dams, you deprive
the downstream farmers of water, thus leading to their displacement.
And that's something else that the Islamic State did.
When they controlled some other dams on the Euphrates River, they would either prevent
the water from flowing to the downstream neighbors, or when those militias I talked about started
to approach ISIS positions, they would deliberately flood the areas, preventing them from conducting
any military actions.
So that kind of gives you an example of the intersection between environment and political
violence.
How has this led to food insecurity?
Food insecurity is the product of not just political violence, but hydropolitics, the
construction of dams.
So here's just a very good example with the construction of some upstream dams in Turkey.
What has happened is the amount of water that now flows through the Euphrates and Tigris
has been curtailed.
And so as a result, when you have less water flowing and temperatures rising, you have
more evaporation of these two rivers, and simply put, you have less water to irrigate.
When water is starting to evaporate, you have lakes that start to dry up, and that exposes
lake beds to the wind, and that creates dust storms.
And now we get back to whether it's the dust storms in the US in the 1930s or in Iraq, that
all collectively leads to not only the displacement of farmers, less cultivation of food, the
depletion of fish or cattle that depend on water, and that all collectively leads to
food insecurity.
And then finally, just very simply, well, need water to survive.
So you have now these issues that I never thought of talking about, water justice.
How do we guarantee equal access to those who are downstream rivers, whether we're talking
about the Euphrates and Tigris or in Egypt, the Nile, which is currently being dammed
in Ethiopia?
You're going to have the same dynamic there.
How has the extreme weather caused by global warming and the resulting increased demand
for electricity contributed to more violence in the region?
So you have both violence and tragedy.
So when you talk about extreme weather, we've witnessed, I mean, this is very fortuitous
because we're witnessing extreme weather on the American Eastern seaboard.
A couple of months earlier, we had Mediterranean hurricanes.
These were unheard of in history.
So much so that we developed a new name for them called medocains, Mediterranean hurricanes,
which caused a dam to collapse in Libya, which resulted in the death of about 10,000 people
overnight.
So you have those kinds of events.
And then in terms of extreme weather leading to violence, it's this.
ISIS and Al Qaeda, they still exist, but they're primarily now spreading to sub-Saharan Africa.
It's just when they, you know, I want you to think what's going to make more news.
ISIS threatening to strike the Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, or ISIS infiltrating a
tribe that's fighting over water rights with another tribe allied to Al Qaeda.
Those tribes fighting over water in sub-Saharan Africa are not going to generate the news,
like ISIS threatening to attack the Taylor Swift concert.
These are the kind of hidden stories of the way fluctuating temperature is leading to
insecurity.
It just doesn't necessarily always generate our attention.
That's actually really sad to think about.
Can you tell us how coastal ecosystems in Gaza have been impacted by both military activities
and climate change, such as rising sea levels and pollution?
Well, sure.
You have.
I mean, the war and the fighting in Gaza, the conflict has been going on since, I mean,
you could trace it back to 2008.
And every single one of those conflicts lead to the targeting of, let's say, desalination
facilities, water treatment facilities, so that over the span of a decade, not only has
Gaza's hydro infrastructure suffered, collectively rising sea waters.
That leads to saltwater intrusions into, let's say, freshwater aquifers.
These you have to imagine, freshwater aquifers is where we get our water from.
We need rain to replenish underwater reserves, reservoirs of water.
And so in coastal areas, when you have saltwater intrusion, that makes the reservoirs, the aquifers,
unfit for human consumption.
How can we fix that?
Well, on one level, you have to, if you're talking about in Gaza in particular, it's
well beyond the crisis point, right?
Right now, it just needs to be trucked in, because you have so much displaced populations.
But in this case, you fix it with investing in desalination infrastructure.
You rebuild freshwater.
You encourage parties in the regions to create a just and equitable water network, an access
to water.
I mean, an access to water that is based on notions of hydro justice, where access to
water is equitable for everyone in the eastern Mediterranean.
How does the environmental damage caused by warfare like degraded air quality intersect
with climate change to create long-term damage to health?
There's a couple of things.
So when we talk about long-term damage to health, we have to realize a lot of munitions
that are deployed use depleted uranium.
And that depleted uranium, it's valuable because it could penetrate, let's say, metal surfaces,
making it a deadlier weapon, but it also results in those munitions more or less contaminating
the area where it's being deployed.
It's a huge problem in conflicts in the Middle East.
It's a huge problem in Ukraine.
Okay, so there you have the actual problem of warfare contaminating the environment.
How does warfare, I wouldn't say warfare contributes to climate change.
Of course, you have to realize with every ship that is mobilized for warfare that you
are contributing, you're making a carbon footprint.
The US military, when it's deployed, makes a larger carbon footprint than some countries.
So it's in those kind of ways that a carrier task force, when it leaves San Diego Harbor
and makes this long journey to the region, there's a carbon footprint.
And then it happens in other ways you probably don't realize.
If the Suez Canal is closed due to fighting in the Red Sea, ships have to make a longer
journey across the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.
Those longer journeys are resulting in greater carbon footprints.
Those ships are just simply producing more fossil fuels in the air.
So it's in these subtle ways that you have to make the connection to realize conflict
does contribute to conflict in the sense that our climate change, I should say.
It's also happened historically.
Whenever we scorched earth tactics, whenever we cut down a forest, you're depriving the
earth of carbon sinks.
So there has been this kind of long-term connection between climate and conflict and depletion
of water or expelling carbon into the atmosphere.
Very interesting.
Now we'd like to hear about the experience of climate refugees.
Please share with our audience how the current conflict in Gaza and Israel intersects with
climate change to aggravate the situation for refugees.
Well, so perhaps I could go back and say, if you look at the kind of long-term story that
the Syrian refugee crisis was intertwined with the management, with political ecology,
the way the environment is managed, and droughts.
Climate refugees, I mean, what's happening in Gaza is it's not so much the story of
climate refugees.
These are internally displaced peoples because the border with Egypt is closed.
So that makes them internally displaced peoples.
In other words, these are peoples being displaced in a small strip of territory.
Climate refugees probably might occur with the desertification that's happening in Iraq,
in the Sahara.
It's perhaps almost happening.
We're just not connecting the dots, that the mass movement of people through Libya towards
Italy is related to failing crops, yields in sub-Saharan Africa.
We're probably already seeing it, we just haven't called it out for what it is.
Relative to international peace efforts, what role does climate change play in calls for
an end to the conflicts in the region?
I think it's just needed.
I'm not sure if there's a direct correlation.
I just think it's needed because we've forgotten climate change is a global issue now.
It's put it off the agenda.
I think that's why a ceasefire is imperative, so that we could go back and focus the world's
attention on the challenges and threats posed by climate change.
What can be learned from past climate-related events in the region that could inform future
conflict resolution efforts?
You had the Conference of Parties 28 event in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
That was the big coming together of the nations to deal with the climate crisis.
What can be learned is that there hasn't been much done in the region.
There's also a real tragic reason for this.
It's for this.
A good number of the economies in the region depend on fossil fuels.
In other words, what we have to recognize is the countries that are most dependent on
fossil fuels are also going to be the countries most affected by climate change.
You have to have that realization and acknowledgement for any change in the region to happen.
Professor Al-Mirashi, what can you tell us about people doing a climate action?
Some solutions are very easy.
The first and most obvious is to vote this upcoming election because this vote is going
to determine the role of this nation in terms of addressing climate change like no other
election I can think of.
The other ways people can take action is to educate themselves.
One book I highly recommend that just came out is called The Heat and the Fury on the
Frontlines of Climate Violence by Peter Schwarzstein, which I recommend.
And then finally, talk about this issue with your friends.
Use elements of popular culture to have this start off as conversations.
One film I recommend watching is Don't Look Up on Netflix that came out.
It's a good analogy for how we're just kind of blind to this issue.
And the other two films that are the recent Dune series, the Dune series are very much
good examples of using science fiction to generate debates and conversations on this
issue.
The Desert Planet that's known as Dune, Arakis, was once a fertile planet until they abused
the water.
So I think you got to find ways to relate how to talk about these issues, raise awareness.
And then once you have the awareness, then you can take action.
And I think what taking action is, it could be anything from podcasts like this, which
is a student initiative, to start introducing change the language we use.
You know, global warming was one term that was introduced to take actually our attention
away from climate change.
You see, it was to make us seem like it's just there's going to be global warming and
then later there might be global cooling.
So we got to kind of reintroduce the way we talk about these issues.
And you know, one is talking about water justice or hydro justice.
And just very good example is south of the border where, you know, not everyone has water
justice like we do in San Diego County.
We have to address that.
That water should be a water justice, hydro justice should be a human right.
The other way of thinking it, you mentioned all living things.
And here's another way we have to change the conversation is this, you know, on the debate
circuit, both candidates are going to be talking about national security.
They might be talking about energy security.
But we got to talk about security in the way that it's all living things or what I call
sentient security is addressed that whether it's plant life, wildlife, domesticated pets
are have some kind of security.
Now when I came to the epiphany of why we need to have a sentient security was the fact
that, you know, during the presidential debate, one candidate more or less talked about immigrants
eating cats and dogs.
And I realized that not only was that just such a poor choice of talking points, but
why is that tragic is the following.
It is that there are cats and dogs dying in Ukraine as we speak.
Deliberately being shot there in the current fighting in Gaza.
There are, you know, domesticated animals as well as animals that are used such as cows,
so on and so forth that are dying for lack of water.
And so this is why I think instead of international security or national security, we need to
start talking about sentient security where all things in the environment, all living
things have some kind of way of being secured.
Well, thank you so much.
Everybody we heard it here first.
So what you can do for a climate action.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course, of course.
When we're speaking about education, then this is a level of this is a message for the
administrators of the campus or the donors is to offer classes on the environmental humanities.
UC San Diego just passed a mandatory climate change class requirement.
And I really think this should be happening at the California State campuses, definitely
this campus throughout all the campuses.
And I do have to say the Cal State did have a good program and I was part of it where
faculty members were part of a workshop on climate resilience.
Where how we professors can teach students how not to be despondent in our classes in
the face of climate change.
And so in my class on women in the Middle East, I talk about female, I talk about women in
particular whose voices are usually suppressed in the Middle East standing up and making
a difference in terms of climate change.
And that should be a cause of optimism, climate optimism.
And so I think that's ultimately what we have to do is not just be despondent in the face
of this that, you know, realize in each and every one of our ways we can make a difference.
Okay, well, this has been fascinating for Professor Amarashi.
I bet our listeners have gained a lot from what you've shared with us today.
Thank you for talking with us and for your time.
Okay, excellent.
Thank you so much.
Now this leads us straight to our call to climate action for this episode.
And that is be water mindful.
Water doesn't appear magically in your sinks.
It takes electricity to get it to your home.
So let's all be more water mindful.
You can start with simple things like turning off the water when brushing your teeth and
washing dishes.
You can fill up a bowl or pot with soapy water for the dishes.
These are just a few quick ideas to try out.
Want to hear more from climate to action, a CSUSM student podcast, listen wherever you
get your podcasts and follow us on our socials at climate to action.
Follow us at climate to action on Instagram, TikTok and X.
Visit for updates behind the scenes content and more.
Finally, climate to action wants to remind you to take climate action.
Be water mindful.
Until next time, this is climate to action signing off.